Warren Spector’s Junction Point Closes

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Sad news travels fast and although it’s taken a while for Disney to confirm, we’d already heard convincing rumours suggesting that Epic Mickey developers Junction Point had closed earlier today. Polygon have now received a statement from the House of Mouse, which reads in part: “These changes are part of our ongoing effort to address the fast-evolving gaming platforms and marketplace and to align resources against our key priorities.” No mention of the poor sales and reception of Epic Mickey 2, which was initially due on PC, then delayed, and now perhaps cancelled. The staff numbered 160 early last year and hopefully those who find themselves without work today will find new projects and/or studios soon.

Much of the focus will fall on the future of Warren Spector. Where now for the man who has been party to the design of some of the most influential games of the nineties? We hope to find out more as soon as possible, but in the meantime our thoughts are with everyone affected.

I don’t think it lived up to the hype. A lot of the concept art seemed a lot darker (i.e. collapsing mechanical goofy and friends, angry Oswald, etc) than the game that turned up (Mickey mouse game with magical paint-spraying brush adventure).

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I played it. While it wasn’t a bad game, it didn’t live up to the hype. While it was dark, it wasn’t THAT dark, and the paint/thinner mechanic wasn’t as interesting as it was on paper. Yes, there were occasional camera issues, but that’s true of a lot of games. I was glad he got a second shot at it, but expectations were low and I don’t think he even met those.

I think he could do a lot of good at Arkane. Dishonoured is a very good game, but there are lots of little bits and pieces that could be tweaked and tightened to make it even better.

Irrational kinda do their own thing – less immersive sim and more story heavy action game. If Spector could assert some kind of influence to pull whatever the next game in the series into a more Looking Glass flavoured title, well that’d be awesome, but I can’t imagine Levine and co actually going for that.

I actually wouldn’t want him to join arkane; the main two head developers are actually a really good pair, working well on making new games, and I’d rather see him establish a different game company elsewhere, (and team up with some dwarf fortress-esque procedural genius, who can encourage him to be more ambitious with embodying his ideas for choice and consequence in chaotic game logic rather than discrete branching).

Please tell me you are joking. Pumping out Star Wars games would’ve given Spector no freedom/joy at all. Disney paid $4 billion for the SW franchise, and you think they would want to make an immersive sim out of SW after that? It’s infinitely more likely he would’ve been producing Star Wars Racer 2-5, Lego Star Wars Kinect Adventures 1-4, or even Disney Infinity: Star Wars, and so on and so forth, until everyone involved were either miserable or just quit. While that may have meant some employment for Junction Point people, I imagine it’s so far removed from the stuff JP Studios set out to do they might as well jump ship.

Best of luck to everyone involved, and the same goes for THQ’s people!

No. I do wonder if that has something to do with Spector leaving and JPS closing. Can you imagine some Disney exec putting JPS on something as horrible as Disney: Infinity? Something which basically amounts to an addictive MMO designed for children to make parents bleed money through their eyesockets and turn them into WoW-addicts before even reaching puberty. I very much doubt even Disney would be so stupid, but then something happened. I somehow doubt it’s that (or that dramatic) though.

Bummer. I haven’t finished EM2 yet (have it for Wii) but it seems like it improved on the original in most ways, and the original was a really good game. It kinda makes me sad that a good game based on the only really good era of cel animation didn’t do much better than Disney shovelware.

I would love to see him end up at WB and making some games based on the Avery/Clampett classics, but there’s obviously no way that would happen.

Too bad for his team! I’m sure Spector will stay in the games industry. Here’s hoping he finally works on non-AAA-budgeted games because I’m impatient, his last decade of projects have all been high-risk on account of their…accounting, and adapting to small games seems to be going well for Tim Schafer & co., the Banner Saga folks, and tons of folks who started small. Maybe he can hire one of those IGF student teams and build something interesting around their project, or make a top-down/isometric game building on the Wasteland 2 folks’ work in Unity.

Hopefully everyone involved will move on to making games people want, rather than fritter away 5 years making Wii Games for children featuring a character that doesn’t resonate with them at all and who are too busy playing Skylanders anyway.

Didn’t Warren mention several times that he’s too old to still be making games? It felt that he’s been hinting that he wants to retire and this seems like a golden opportunity. I sure as hell hope he at least makes one more good game though. Call me crazy but maybe even assemble a small team and do a kickstarter for a low-fi/budget game, but one that’s deep and complex in the vein of Deus Ex? I’m sure people would literally throw money at him

It’s worth noting that Junction Point had some development under way on what looked like a (fantasy?) dungeon-crawler prior to their engulfment by Disney.

Disney might have let JPS retain the rights to that game, although I don’t know where it would go with the dissolution of JPS itself.

I’m grasping at straws here, obviously. But for my money, there aren’t nearly enough games being made in the “multiple ways to solve game challenges” model. I’d be very happy if Warren Spector decided to help produce a new game showcasing that player-centric design philosophy in shiny modern technology.

Going from solid PC games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief and Deus Ex, to cartoon crap, well I say every less casual game developer in the world with a job makes gaming as whole better off.